


Gloria

by Aphoride



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Artistic references, Boys In Love, Canon Gay Character, Canon Gay Relationship, Community: HPFT, Community: grindeldore, Elements from The Iliad, Elements of Alexander the Great/Hephaestion, Implied/Referenced Sex, Indian Ocean, Literary/Philosophical References, Little bit 'o politics, M/M, No seriously too many references, Persepolis (Persian city), References to laudanum, Romance, Vienna (city), adoration, references to drinking, too many references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 03:29:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4206252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aphoride/pseuds/Aphoride
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.</p>
<p>- Homer, The Iliad</p>
<p>(Albus/Gellert)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gloria

Gloria  
  
_Every man has his masterpiece; that one thing, one work, one moment, for which history will remember him, which will write his name in the stars, give him life beyond death and memory, immortality in ink and paper._  
  
_Michelangelo had his David; Beethoven, his Ninth Symphony; Homer, the Iliad._  
  
_And you, Albus – when you are dead, when you are buried and the world wants a single snapshot of your life, a moment when you were most brilliant, the name and title of the best and most perfect thing you ever created, what will they say?_  
  
_Not the truth, never that. For the truth is far too scandalous._

* * *

I: What are the children of men, but as leaves that drop at the wind's breath?  
  
Red – crimson, maroon, cardinal – red, all red; that is all you see, your vision swallowed up by it, leaking over your irises like ink in a pond. Shallow, the ink fast-moving, it looks like the world is bleeding, dying perhaps (the world or you? You cannot help but wonder), and the thin tendrils of white, lines like scars running through it, remind you of a heart, riddled with veins in a winding, bending pattern which never ends.  
  
There is no beat, though, no sense of life throughout it – just red.  
  
In each drop which falls, small and perfectly tear-shaped – a procession of tiny, falling stars – there is a breath, a moment’s worth of passion, of anger, trapped within it; all those things you have tried so hard to deny, bleeding out of you like snakes fleeing an earthquake.  
  
It is only right, truly, on some level, that you should live empty, devoid of the pleasures and pains emotions would bring. You will be cast adrift from the rest of the world, never cold but never warm, both craving and abstaining, straining against the chains you wear even as you pray that they hold.  
  
You are Prometheus, now, though you forged the links yourself, each one stained marbled red-and-white with your sweat and your tears and your blood. Even Zeus cannot free you from them now, God of Gods that he is; nor Hephaestus shatter the chains, Ares cleave through them with his sword. Even Hades could not strip your life from you as you hang, precarious and tortured, on the very edge of the sky, surveying the world below you.  
  
Truthfully, it would have been easier to stake yourself through the heart – to fall on your sword like the great generals of old. Alas, then, that you have never had the courage for that, that you have too much vanity to accept that, perhaps, the world does not need you as much as you want to believe it does.  
  
(For it does, you know this, it is true – it must be true. Where there is day, there must also be night; fire and water, earth and sky; the world must stay balanced, and so while he lives, so must you.  
  
If not… well, what else is left for you, then?)  
  
Chains which bind, chains you made but not alone – not truly alone, for did you not use his blood in their making, in their forging, his tears to dampen the fire, and the memory of his smile, of that accursed smile (you would die for it, you would live for it, you would kill for it still), is the hammer on which they must be tested.  
  
Must. Will. They will be tested. They are always tested.  
  
Now, then, in the future, there is blood on your wrists from where the chains have broken, where you have ripped them out of the mountainside, sticky and a bright red, and it leaves trails on his skin, on your skin, on the sheets beneath you both.  
  
It speaks of your imprisonment, of the pain you suffer – you both suffer – of the desire and hatred and anger and the passion, an endless tide of it which drowns you so easily, so sweetly you have stopped trying to resist it, you cannot deny. How could you when it has defined you for so long? When it is, you think, better than the anger you had before, more beautiful than that, far more right and more satisfying in the end – for this, this comes with the potential of release beyond the physical world, the emotional sphere, and into the realm of the spiritual, things man can only ever attempt to decipher in his madness.  
  
In candlelight, in firelight, in moonlight alone, it is the colour you search for the most on him: that perfect imperfection as it scatters across his cheeks, a flush he never wears in the day, the raised lines, deep pink and raw, on your shoulders and arms, down your back, the roses – Lancashire roses, symbol of your youth, of your father’s anger – blooming on his neck and lips.  
  
When he twines your hair – fallen leaves in autumn, he tells you, summer incarnate in your arms – around a finger so gently, with a reverence he reserves only for praying, for when you take him and kiss him and when he tells you he loves you, your smile falters, grows dark and the wine on his breath when you kiss him (delicately, then, as though he is made of crystal because how else do you say I love you too?) tastes sour on your tongue.  
  
Fallen leaves, a poetic description by all accounts, but something about the image that conjures up – a nymph, summer-born, slowly dying from the frost and the cold, wilting as she fades, her petals floating and rotting on the wind, her leaves curling and crackling and crumbling into dust, scattered and lost to time – chills you, makes your hands tremble.  
  
Glory has one ultimate enemy: death. You do not want to die – for if you die, then he could too, and there should never exist a power in the world able to kill him.  
  
(You fear for yourself, that is true, but you fear for him more. You could not live without him; ah, but can you live with him?)  
  
You forget, at times, that passion returned kindles love, but passion denied – love never returned – can just as easily breed anger in its turn. They do not come separately, these things, but hand-in-hand, a train of sisters sworn to each other for all time.  
  
You love him, though, and he loves you, and soon you will set the world on fire together, the heralds of tomorrow in today.

* * *

_Albus, oh Albus, I am yours – yours and only yours, you know this beyond anything else. We can never be separated; not by propriety, not by death itself. I could not bear to lose you, it would be the end of me, for I am forged in you._  
  
_Blood of my blood, heart of my heart; now, I wonder how I ever truly lived without you, what I did then, how I was then. Incomplete, I suspect. Incomplete and half-alone.  
_  
_Now, I do not know what I would do without you - how would I breathe, how would I speak, how would I think? Closer than brothers, they said, and how little they knew; so true and so false all at once, and yet there is no better way to describe us.  
_  
_We are more than brothers - bound by soul as well as by blood. In my chest, I feel your heartbeat alongside mine, and every forced separation leaves me gasping.  
_  
_Albus, oh Albus, you must know this._

* * *

II: …There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.  
  
White drops, like liquid diamonds, caught in the mesh of fine brown lashes, brushing against his cheeks when he blinks, long and slow. Puppet-master, he drags his gaze up to yours and yours down to his, spell-bound. Knowing you are watching, watching you watching, he smiles, coy and sly, purses his lips and waits, patiently, for you to kiss him.  
  
You do; of course you do. You always do.  
  
You kiss him, chaste, husband to wife, and cup his cheek with one hand, white skin against tan. He does not move below your gaze or your touch, does not even seem to blink. His eyes stay closed, a blanket of jewels weaving itself across his eyelashes and down onto his skin.  
  
It could be armour of a sort, perhaps – in another age, where armour was the norm and battles were waged with strength and might and blood gushing through veins, from veins. In that age, you would coat him in them as you coat him in silks now, so that when he was clothed he would shine, a star on earth, and no man’s blow could ever hope to fell him.  
  
Ah, but now diamonds are only armour on rings, rings with promises, and you have given him all of those already.  
  
You have given him more besides – and taken twice as much.  
  
White is virtue, after all, and that was gone from you the moment you saw him, your head lost to fantasy and your heart offered on a silver platter.  
  
Daily, in the end, you will wonder when it turned to love, if ever you could have stopped it going so far, and you do not know why for the answer only torments you more.  
  
That as soon as you saw him, Eros struck, straight and true, so that all that could be seen of the wound was the plumage, red and gold and hot to touch, the shaft bone-white, plucked with the feather from the breast of the bird. Nothing more was needed, and nothing earthly or divine could save you then.  
  
Who would want to be saved, though, when what poisons you is so exquisite as this?  
  
Even as it hollows out your bones, carves your heart out of your chest until it rests in his hands, as it destroys you cell by cell until you can no longer live on your own (did you ever really, though? Or did you just survive and call it living?) and you drown in sensation as it plays on your senses, a helpless child in the face of such an onslaught. You see the world cast in a rainbow of scents, from the clay-brown of cinnamon to the sharp orange of mandarin; taste a thousand sunsets on your tongue; feel the flickering light from a million stars spinning in the sky above you trace numbers, letters, symbols across your skin.  
  
Above it all, steady and comforting, the rhythm of it so strong, so all-encompassing, you can hear nothing else, you can think of nothing else, his heart beats and his lungs surge and sigh. You think of it constantly, always waiting, straining for the next breath, the next beat.  
  
Sometimes it skips, sometimes he does not breathe for a second, two, three, four, five, six… and when he does you hold him a little tighter.  
  
You and he, you are a pair. You match each other as well as any pair have ever done, as those famed lovers: from Achilles and Patroclus down through the ages. You live for each other, with each other.  
  
He is life, for you: the promise of a new one, and the cleansing of the old.  
  
Sheltered in white, in the innocence of first love (of true love, you think, but you can never say that out loud – how foolish of you, even if you know he would not see it so, believing in the divine right, in fate and predestination, in life after death and in the powers of a deity invisible, immortal and perfect in his righteousness), you feel cleaner than you ever have done before, wiser and more youthful and more glorious.  
  
Men now, and men looking at the promise of glory, the promise of success and dreams made flesh, made tangible truth; was this, you wonder, how Alexander and Hephaestion felt the eve before they rode off to war, how Achilles and Patroclus were before the boarded the ships to Troy – both china and adamantium at the same time, mortal and immortal; a candle fluttering in the wind, and a roaring fire all at once.  
  
Words flutter about you in the air: soft, delicate things, butterflies with wings the colour of rosebuds and cherry blossom. Behind them trails the scent of lavender sprigs, your mother’s favourite flower, and the crisp, blank slate of winter, of the wind at his most pure, stripping life from the land in preparation for its rebirth.  
  
Feather-light things, so easily broken; but you treasure them carefully, secrets made flesh, for it is those secrets which bind you together, tighter than anything else could ever bind.  
  
Perhaps there is little else about either of you which is pure, which could be called pure – both of you angry for too long, since too young at things you could never hope to change – except for this.  
  
It is then that you learn that though the rest of the tree might be rotten, the fruit sour and the flowers fading, love is always pure.  
  
Always.

* * *

_They will assume, I know, that what I did I did for hate, for anger, for the sole, inexplicable joy at seeing the world burn, hearing children scream and women cry. They will assume it was for my own pleasure, a selfish desire, and they will tell you this, as though they know the truths of this world – as though they know the truths of us. They will assume what they like about us, about the reasons why, simply because they can, for it is always what happens to every great man.  
_  
_One of us will be blackened beyond the night and deep into Hell; the other glorified beyond belief, raised to the right-hand side of God._  
  
_Oh Albus, no matter what happens, no matter how these things end, or what is done in the name of glory, it was all for you. It was all done for you – to make you happy._  
  
_Truthfully, I would have done more, anything, to have you back, and that, there, is my weakness._

* * *

III: ...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.  
  
Notes fall into the air, musical, languid even as their tones speak of an underlying passion, dripping from his mouth with every twitch of a muscle; floating over to you, they burrow into your ears, into your mind and even to your soul – woodpeckers, perhaps, rather than the hummingbirds he usually blows over to you, drilling deep into you until the words they carry resonate from within, and you feel your own tongue move.  
  
It is a magic – a real, pure, utterly unfathomable magic – you have fought with, played with, and now which he has turned into something tangible, something intoxicating: an opiate, laudanum perhaps, or strong brandy, deep burned orange as it swills around the bottom of the glass, lightening into sunglow gold at the height of it.  
  
If you could, you would pluck the glass from the air and tip it back, swallow it all in one go.  
  
From across the room, his eyes burn into you, Egyptian blue, and you are transfixed: if it were not for the colour, dark sapphires at his wrists and – you know well – tucked underneath his shirt (though you fancy you can almost see the shape of it, a slender circle, through the material), you might think him a statue, carved from marble and clothed in gold leaf.  
  
David born in flesh, perhaps, but as a legend, as a comparison, it is too cold, you think – too cold to aptly convey the passion and the heat and the craving he has within him, love’s addict. Outwardly, he is always composed: the beauty of Italian dreams crafted through Hungary’s blood and Germany’s patient, steady building.  
  
Vienna, perhaps, if you had to assign him a city. Vienna, Wien, in all her Romanesque façades, Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance palaces, sandstone and marble bodies, burnished and finished with copper and gold so that they glitter a hundred miles away, on the edge of the horizon.  
  
The heart of an empire, capital for a new world, and the home of an Emperor.  
  
One day, you know, you will crown him there, you will sit beside him on a dais, glory on your shoulders, and when you kiss him then thousands will cheer.  
  
No one will come between you then, immortal and eternal, not even Hades, and you will watch your own legacies take shape, watch as he betters Caesar, betters Alexander, betters even the kings of recent past – Wilhelm and Charles and Victoria. After all, in him there is perfection of the warrior-prince, politician and general and king in one; and in you – it is as it was in your games as a child, as you saw in the stories your father told you – there is perfection of the great friend, created by Patroclus and lived by Hephaestion, by Lancelot and by so many others.  
  
You will be better than them, though. You will not betray him, or disobey him, or leave him – not even to die. Parting would cost you both too dearly – he would follow, you know this, as Achilles followed Patroclus and Alexander, Hephaestion.  
  
A year, in total, he whispered to you one night. A year without you; no more and no less, for sixteen already was enough.  
  
At night, he is sweet, tender, pliant almost; not King, then, not Emperor or master or lord of anything, but himself alone. It is a kind of freedom, candlelight, it speaks of a loneliness in the world, that there is nothing else but you and him and the room, gold edges rusting as dark falls and the shadows press ever closer.  
  
It is little more than smoke, though, something you can banish with a muttered word and an airy wave of your hand, since it is always driven back, endlessly, by day in turn. You have always thought, in truth, that night does not suit him. If you could, you would banish the moon, tether her chariot to the underworld, slay the horses so she could never ride again, so that you could always see him, Apollo incarnate, in gold and yellow and cream, colours woven into lace in the air.  
  
He is a child of sun, no matter the season; a flower who flourishes in his attention.  
  
Happiness, success, glory; they all suit him abominably well, sending sprinkle of pink glitter along his cheekbones, eyes set aglow, and emotion, pure and natural, pouring out of him, a magnetic field which pulls gazes to him, drags smiles even from enemies and opponents.  
  
All around you are the last vestiges of a previous empire: Prussia’s will and testament carved out in marble floors, columns twined with ivy, bursts of Gloire de Dijon roses and jasmine dotted here and there, counted in thousands of gilt-framed masterpieces, crystal chandeliers the size of horses and aureate statues of gods and goddesses, heroes and villains, tucked away in alcoves, rays of light falling on their heads.  
  
As a whole the scene glitters, light split and split again, ribbons of rainbows flashing through the air everywhere you look, miniature fireworks, elegant in their silence; and in the centre of it all, he stands, the man who would be king, and every breath he gives, every words he says, everything he touches bows to him and falls, neatly and easily, perfectly into place.  
  
Midas, you think, Midas in his hall of gold.

* * *

_It is Spring, and I wait for you, endlessly – the days stretch into nights, nights where I do not sleep, and the nights blend into days, so that I forget where I am, when I am, time lost in my mind because the only way I keep track of it is to count down the days until you return._  
  
_There is blossom on the trees, then, and I wait for it to fall, impatient and restless, for when it falls, you will come to me again, shedding Aristotle for Hephaestion, and that it what I want._  
  
_Summer passes too soon, though, and when the fruits sour, the winds turn harsh, biting and howling – madmen possessed – you go; and so in Autumn, Autumn which reminds me most of you, with the red-and-orange leaves littering the branches and the grass both, I am alone._  
  
_The death of nature, ever-repeating, and with it, the death of half of my spirit, for part of me goes always with you._

* * *

IV: Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.   
  
Sandalwood and jasmine drift around the room, clouds of scent curling and twisting on the air, floating in from the open windows – the shutters beyond flung wide – with the breeze, the sound of Laughing Doves and Purple Sunbirds singing mere metres away drifting through, sharp and trill and yet so calming. Sultry, slow smells, they mingle easily with the tang of blackberries, of black cherries and pomegranates, blending into something at once lighter and deeper, full-bodied and addictive in complexity.  
  
Perfume, of a sort, though it is too strong and too dispersed: a blanket over the room, settling on every grain of wood and every inch of satin; but it speaks to you nonetheless of summer evenings alone in a garden, tucked amongst the flowers with nothing but each other and the peeking stars for company.  
  
He tastes – his skin, his mouth, all of him – of wine, rich and husky and smooth, the alcohol burned away by the heat of his body so all that remains is sap, sticky and sweet, and the faint reminder that once it was more. It is still powerful, though: even as you glide your tongue up his chest, hands following in its wake, you wonder if he would bleed juice, clear and thin, whether if you had enough of him you would lose your mind to the bliss of inebriation, or lose yourself entirely.  
  
(Maybe, though, it has already happened – or, rather, perhaps in charting so much of him you have found yourself, more of yourself than you would ever have known otherwise?  
  
A six and two threes, you think idly.)  
  
Indigo splashes light up the edges of his skin, a reflection from the satin sheets below, run down the bones of his hip in a slender, long line you trace with a finger. He doesn’t shiver, doesn’t shudder, doesn’t even move; merely stays still, basking in the weight of your gaze, the light it bathes him in.  
  
Purple, the colour of kings and emperors since time immemorial, and you alone have dressed him in it, fed him on it, pressed it into his skin so that there is nothing else in the world he could be.  
  
He will rule Europe, could rule the world – would, you think, in time – and you, what will you do?  
  
Rule me, is the answer he gives, and there is a steadiness, a simplicity about the answer that tightens your throat, your heart expanding inside your chest so that you almost fear you might explode. Rule me, because you already do – and he teases hands up your thighs, flicking you a look from underneath heavy, dark eyelashes.  
  
The idea is wonderfully, beautifully perfect – an offer on a golden dish, sumptuous and delicious and so impossible to refuse – he will be king, king in the day, the face the world will see, the mind they will know, and you will rule him in the shadows, from the shadows. The words he speaks will be yours, the smiles he shows will be yours, the thoughts he has will be yours; behind the scenes, the façade the world sees, the two of you will stay, side by side: the very best of friends, closer than any man and wife could ever hope to be.  
  
(Closer than brothers, the women in Godric’s Hollow had tittered. Ah, if only they had known…)  
  
You crave that more than anything: the realisation of perfection, living a destiny foretold; happiness, in the end, far more than you imagined you could have when you were young.  
  
It is strange, though, how things change over the years, like a stream flowing on and on, carrying you in its arms, powerless to change the current or the direction or the force of its course, no matter where you feel you should be, what you think the skies above you should look like; spring stars fading into summer into autumn into winter and round again. Time is slipping away from you, sand through your fingers, and with it, you wonder, him?  
  
The cause, the dreams you helped him sketch – your hand covered his on the quill, lifted it to dip into ink, and it is both your names at the top of the page – they consume him now, day and night; he writes you reams and reams, forests in letters, and in them he talks endlessly about what to do next, where to go, when to go.  
  
(Always, always, he says that he misses you. That it would be easier were you there; that he loves you. This; you do not doubt this, any of it.)  
  
Once, the quill, the brush was in your hand, cradled by your fingers, and so it was your mind and gestures which drew the boundaries, designed the dreams he had carried with him for so long – the dreams you had searched for, so often, in the dark – and now, now it is in his, the pupil surpassing the master, and you see his eyes turn to the others gathered around him, those who are there when you are not, those who have, like him, dedicated their lives to the dreams you pencilled out, to him.  
  
Some say it was in Persia that Hephaestion lost Alexander’s love to a slave boy, pretty and dark and slender, so similar and yet so different; that the key to Persia alone was not enough of a gift to keep him. You are not Hephaestion, he is not yet Alexander, and there is no boy (though there is a key to Persia and it rests, cold and silent, in his pocket), but you cannot help but feel a shadow pass over your heart, and you cling to him tighter, linger on in Persepolis long past when you should have left.  
  
You cannot lose him, not now. You will not lose him.  
  
(But blackberries grow sour when left too long.)

* * *

_Our dreams pervade my every thought, slip inside my mind when I dream and invade any moment I dare try to take to myself; they pervert my words, my gestures, so much so that I wonder if I have been too zealous, if in wanting so much I have built myself around them, if I have somehow turned the focus of myself, of my desires, away from you._  
  
_Then, as always, I see you again, or – no, it is often simpler than that – I think of you, merely, and I sigh, all other thoughts fled from my head, nothing left but the memories of you and I, lost to the world in each other, in the dreams we discovered we share, the dreams we want for each other._  
  
_Here, in Persia, in Persepolis, on the edge of the world we have created, more than ever, you should be with me. This will be where our stories will divide from history._  
  
_Oh, Albus, I wait endlessly._

* * *

V: There is nothing alive more agonized than man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.   
  
In front of you, the Indian Ocean is a painting: turquoise flowers dotted on top of a deep, sapphire blue sea, flicks and licks of white spray swishing up towards you, the edges of it touching the horizon, stretching up to merge into the sky, a solitary puff of wind and snow gathered there, progressing slowly, stately.  
  
You do not think you have ever seen the sea have so beautiful a look, so artistic a temperament; you almost wish you could preserve the moment forever, bind the sky and the sea and the sun so that none of it would ever change or fade.  
  
The sun beats down on your head, strong and fierce, and you see him, clothes abandoned long ago, slip into the sea, sending ripples reaching out, cascading out across the delicate mirage nature had spread across the surface. It does not break, though, not even for him, merely seems to absorb him, so that he becomes a part of it: a single, gold-toned swimmer, basking in the delights of peace and freedom and beauty.  
  
Water clings to his shoulders, drops crying as they slip off, falling from his hair like a miniature shower of rain, and you think that it becomes him very well.  
  
(Though, in truth, everything suits him. Everything beautiful looks more so on him; everything ugly looks half that on him. Dorian Grey, indeed; but you readily admit that you are biased.)  
  
Ironic, perhaps, that something so cooling and soothing, a welcome respite from the heat which stifles you, dries out your mouth so words crack on your tongue even before you speak them, can be so destructive – tsunamis smashing through trees, through villages without remorse, sweeping away everything before them, no mercy and no immovable object to counter; storms, sweeping up coasts, across oceans paths, battles between sky and sea, swallowing ships whole in the war, an innocent cost.  
  
Ironic, perhaps, that he who is so beautiful, so wonderful to you, so perfect in almost every way, should have such horrors committed in his name, should sanction perhaps – for you do not know, you do not know and you never want to know – such things.  
  
Gold and blue; he has always been gold and blue. Royal colours, jewel colours; you should have remembered that gold rusts and sapphires crack, that metal can be melted and jewels ground into dust.  
  
In the sea, away from you, tan skin flashes through the air, sunlight winking at you – vulgar and lascivious – and you can only watch as he dives through the water cleanly, leaving a small trail of white froth in his wake.  
  
Slytherin green, you think, as you watch him emerge amongst a splash of mint green on the water’s skin; ambition, cunning, resourcefulness, drive. Everything he is; everything you are, and everything, perhaps, which has orchestrated this coup, fashioned the dagger from your own blood – yours and his, and it slips in your hand when you hold it, though it grows sticky fast, warmed by the heat of your body – and tied it, your fingers straining against the binds, to your palm with strings which whisper of loyalty, of bravery, of a righteousness you are not sure you possess.  
  
Drops of blood, red and thick, coat the string, baked yellow and brown in the sun.  
  
Do they know, you wonder, what it is they have asked you to do? What it will cost you to do it, when you do – for you must, this is beyond doubt. Would they ever understand, if you told them, or would they laugh, sneer and roll their eyes, reminding you that stories remain in books, we do not live them, and history is gone, that is why it is written.  
  
You know they do not, and you think that if they did, if they knew that it would mean you had to prise your own heart out of your chest, rip his from his body – still beating, both of them, still beating in the silence – and dash them against the rocks until there is nothing left, perhaps then they might not ask you.  
  
(They would murder him instead; an assassin instead of an equal, a knife instead of a duel, and in that moment you would die too.)  
  
No, the knife is in your hand and the burden is on your shoulders and this can be no other way; you will not let this end the way they want it to, you will find a way to save him from the hangman. You can do that much, at least.  
  
He will lose his glory, your dreams will shatter, and the scar of infamy will strike into his soul, but you will not lose him; that is a price you cannot pay.  
  
(You do not ever ask him if he would pay it. There is no need to – and the fear of the wrong answer, the wrong kind of answer, perhaps, grips you too strongly.)  
  
Now, in this moment – the last moment you will have with him like this, happy, at peace, in love – he is floating on his back in the sea, Achilles’ mother reaching up to shroud him in her cloak, a thin sheen of water slowly evaporating off his skin. His hair is dyed a dark, sandy gold, hanging straight and long, spread out in the water like the snakes Medusa wore.  
  
Your heart aches, and silently, even as he calls to you and smiles and beckons you into the water, even as he rises from it, stark and blissfully cool and so unconcerned with the rest of the world, and takes your hand, you murmur a silent goodbye.  
  
So it ends, your dreams and you-and-him, on the shores in India; in paradise. How disappointingly fitting.  
  
(He will never forgive you; he will never forget. This betrayal will kill him just as much as it will save him.  
  
Glory, then, at last, but at what cost?)

* * *

_You have gone, fled in the darkness like the traitor that you are. How long did you plan this? How long did you intend this? How long – ah, but what does it matter how long? What do facts mean in the face of emotions, in the face of those secrets you and I tried so hard to hide?_  
  
_My heart is broken, Albus, though the world will never believe it. You have stolen my heart and run away with it; trampled it into the chalk cliffs of your pretty, damp England. You have robbed me, at the time I needed it most, of so much of myself, with my conscience and my caution and my wonderful, sparkling wit._  
  
_For that is what love is, is it not? Giving yourself to another, and receiving them in return, so that in the end it is impossible to see where one ends and the other begins; the lines of our souls are forever blurred, Albus._  
  
_I would have done anything for you, before this. I would have built empires for you, levelled mountains, crossed seas and volcanoes barefoot. I would have fought until the end of time to see our dreams, our utopian ideal, realised in flesh and in blood._  
  
_Anything, but it was not enough, was it?_  
  
_Shared glory, how hateful. Well, now we share it no longer, we will share nothing any longer, save our history for I would not erase that – I hope it chokes you in the night when you remember me, hope it turns that precious joy of yours to ash and your glory into a crown of thorns._  
  
_I loved you – but did you ever love me more than glory?_  
  
_And so, the murderer and the betrayed, the very best of friends, we end._

* * *

**A/N:** Written for the Sink Your OTP Challenge, and the Second Person POV Challenge on harrypotterfanfiction.com/forums.   
  
The quotes for the section headings and the story summary are from The Iliad by Homer, translated by various scholars, and so none of them belong to me. All references to Alexander and Hephaestion, Bagoas, and aspects of their lives and histories do not belong to me; they were, of course, real people ;) References to Midas, Prometheus, Hephaestus, Zeus, Ares, Hades, Achilles and Patroclus, Troy, Lancelot, Medusa and Dorian Grey do not belong to me either - they belong to their respective owners: various (for the figures of Greek myth), including Homer and Virgil, various (for Lancelot), including Thomas Mallory, and Oscar Wilde (for Dorian Grey). Equally, references to Beethoven, Michelangelo, Homer, and their works do not belong to me either - the works are the referenced artists own, and they were real people.   
  
The city of Vienna is not mine, sadly, though I would love to visit some day :)   
  
(If someone spots a reference I've missed, please let me know. I think I included too many :P)   
  
Thank you very much for reading - I hope you enjoyed! :)


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